


satan ain’t hard to see without craning your neck

by futureboy (PokeRowan)



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Fake AH Crew, Friendship, Gen, no romo lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 13:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13342230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PokeRowan/pseuds/futureboy
Summary: He's a remote explosive, waiting for someone to call.(Michael Jones is having a bad, lonely evening, and Steffie Hardy is a medical professional, so she's usually pretty good at fixing stuff.)





	satan ain’t hard to see without craning your neck

**Author's Note:**

> [RPF disclaimer: Written according to guidelines set by RT employees (to the best of my knowledge). This is a fictional series of events using characters inspired by real people.]

Los Santos is almost fuckin’ pretty, from all the way up here. As the sun sets, it leaves glittering trails across skyscrapers and lines of cars, cast in white and orange and burnt pink.

Michael knows that it’s not pretty, though. The lights aren’t glitter; they’re powdered glass. Not sand or softness, but something that could blind and graze without you even noticing.

He’s not the person everyone might expect to find on the roof. The LSPD always look for Jeremy up there, convinced that he might be in position and ready to take them out from a far off ledge, but they don’t know he’s petrified of heights. Gavin likes heights because he’s an idiot with almost no balance, and an even thinner grasp on an awareness of consequences. Jack’s always in the air if she can get up there. Geoff can appreciate the drama of casting a silhouette over Los Santos; Ryan, however, is better at doing so.

No-one looks for Michael.

He kinda wants a cigarette. Maybe a swig of whisky to take the edge off. He doesn’t like to risk the lightheadedness, though, not when he’s up so high - and he gave up smoking almost as soon as he’d started it when he’d been an idiot kid. Fuckin’ stupid habit. Never quite got rid of the urge to put those dumb things in his mouth, but to Michael, it’s just one other nagging little voice in the back of his head telling him to be a moron.

God, he hates nights like this. The sun’s going down over a city he practically co-owns, and all he wants to do is tear himself to shreds.

“Michael? You up here? I’ve got those… Oh.”

He turns, from where he’s leaning on the thick concrete of the rooftop ledge, to see the fire exit door open.

“Hey, Steffie.”

“What are you doing?” she asks, and honestly, if she’d been anyone else, Michael would have told her to fuck off. The Fakes know how his moods can crash. Even Gavin will find something to do until Michael comes back, and they rarely talk about it.

Not Steffie, though. She keeps things running, and her voice is soothing and quiet. So Michael doesn’t do anything but rest his head in his hands when she mirrors his stance, and leans in the ledge next to him.

“I wanna go home,” he eventually says, “but that’s dumb as hell, because I feel pretty fuckin’ at home _here_.”

“I’ve heard New Jersey is, uh… certainly something,” Steffie settles on.

“It’s _shit_.”

“Oh. That’s the word I was looking for.”

Michael huffs with laughter, even though he’s not feeling particularly happy at all, and looks out over the city again. From his apartment building, he can see the bank they hit last week. Maybe if he had some binoculars, or something, he’d be able to pick out the shattered windows, and the plywood they’d probably put over the busted doors, but he doesn’t. So he can’t.

“D’ya think there’s something waiting on us?”

“Hm?”

“Y’know,” he says, “like, God, or hell, or something. I don’t know. We do a lot of crazy shit. Maybe I deserve something I’m not getting.”

Steffie shifts on her heels, takes a deep breath, and closely follows the slow red lights that trickle down the highway. “Well,” she starts. “All the stuff we do, it’s got two sides to it. Probably more. Right?”

“How’d you mean?”

“Look at the roads, Michael,” she says, and when she turns to look at him, she’s smiling. “Remember last year when we hit Maze Bank?”

“Yeah, it was a fuckin’ _bloodbath_ ,” he reminds her. “Twenty six people died, and I blew a chunk of building clear into the next block. It was a great heist, but holy shit, Steffie, _we kill people_.”

“People like David Marks,” Steffie says. “He was the CEO of some country club in the north, and he was stashing all the money he should’ve paid into taxes with Maze.”

“You got that right. Maze don’t care.”

“ _None_ of the banks care, Michael. That’s the point. We might take hostages, and we might take out threats, but we never get innocent bystanders if we can help it.”

The sky is turning darker and bluer, now. Michael frowns. “What about the roads, then?”

“All the cash we grabbed funded the roadworks in Davis,” she giggles. “Kent sorted it so they fixed the potholes outside the high school as a top priority, too.”

“Oh,” says Michael. He hasn’t been into Davis for a long while.

“And remember last summer?” she continues. “The Penris building? And the Lombank raid?”

“I remember getting fuckin’ _tazed_.”

Steffie rolls her eyes behind her glasses. “You’re such a baby. No, I meant the project Kdin was running.”

“Yeah,” says Michael, thinking about how they’d totally fucked up the entire structure of local legality, with their name-changing stunt they’d pulled. He’d never seen so many people excited to go to the DMV before. “I guess that was pretty cool.”

“Right?”

“Right,” he says, and rolls some of their previous work around in his head. Where had the money from that awful French jewellery store gone? He’s pretty sure they used it to bail out all those guys on souped-up, racist drug charges from right under the LSPD’s nose, just in time for Father’s Day. There’s the Fakes’ yearly heist that they could channel directly into funding the children’s hospital, too, which is always painful and exhausting and _incredible_.

There’s the stupid stuff they pull, too. He and Jeremy and Gavin, just last week, had stolen that fuck-off enormous horse statue and dumped it on its side in a kiddies’ play park for them to climb over. It’d been the funniest damn thing. Team Lads were happy, the little ones were happy, and Portola Drive had practically shit themselves with fury.

Michael doesn’t feel that bad anymore. Steffie’s smoothed down his corners, because she’s a goddamned superhero.

“Pizza?” she asks, when he grins at her.

“Oh, hell yeah.”

“I even brought your car around,” she says, pulling the keys from her jacket pocket and dangling them in front of him. “It’s forensically spotless.”

“Steffie, you’re a fuckin’ genius.”

“I know,” she smiles. “C’mon, I want garlic bread, too. Can’t get shit as good at Los Santos garlic bread in New Jersey, I bet.”

Michael splutters with laughter, and lets the fire door bang shut behind him as they descend into the stairwell. “You can,” he says, “but it comes with a side of rats, so, y’know, I take what I can get here. I’ll even buy.”

“No rats? You gentleman--”

And Michael figures that at least if he _does_ end up in Hell, he’s gonna be in good company. It probably shouldn’t be so comforting, but when he’s coming back from a crash, it’s a damn comforting feeling.

**Author's Note:**

> More uncommon/unlikely friendship fic from Rowan Futureboy, who is entirely predictable. Title from ['The Battle of Hampton Roads'](https://open.spotify.com/track/5NMAqcz6QYf95u3R8Xm2kX) by Titus Andronicus. Love me some +@.
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://futureboy-ao3.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
